5 Things I Learned From Hiring My First 100 Employees

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The most brilliant ideas are destined to flop if they’re
not backed by the right people. Even the most tenacious leaders
are only as strong as their employees, and attracting talent and
making critical hiring decisions can be make or break for
companies.

I’ve learned a few things in
hiring my first 100 employees over the past 5 years. These
lessons have fundamentally changed the way we approach building
our team.

1. Figure out who is
hungry. Hire them.

People are getting good at
interviewing and many have it down to a science. Some come
equipped with stock answers that sound perfect but might not tell
you much about what the person is really like. It’s easy enough
to separate the people who know their stuff from those who
haven’t bothered to do their research but when people are really
hungry for the job and have passion for the company you can feel
it.

I now ask top candidates to go
the extra mile to show that they not only want the job but are
willing to make sacrifices for it and have the capacity to dive
right in and do it. For us this might mean a case-style interview
that places candidates in a situation where they’ll need to
perform as they would on a regular day on the job, interacting
with the people that they would be working with. This is a great
way to see how resourceful people can be in situations where all
they have is their own background research and creativity.

One of the best people we ever
hired was our Creative Director of Product, Jon Patrick. At the
time we were just getting started and set up a cardboard box of
an office in New York. Jon was coming from Ralph Lauren, a
storied American apparel brand, and a company known for having
some of the most stunning offices in the industry. Not only was
he undeterred by the surroundings, he had a clear vision for
where he wanted the company to go and was willing to risk
everything for the opportunity to be a part of it.

2. Screen against your
company values.

There are thousands of
exceptional candidates out there, but not every one of them is
going to be the right fit. As a startup you don’t just need
people who are capable of doing the job, you need to find people
who are passionate about what the company does and believe in its
vision. This might mean hiring someone with less experience in
your field and turning down someone who is perfect on
paper.

One of my goals as an
interviewer is to figure out what characteristics the candidate
has and then get a feel for how they map to our company values.
Have they done something entrepreneurial in the past? Have they
demonstrated integrity in a tough situation? Are they driven
toward innovation? These priority values will be different for
every company and its extremely important to know what is most
important. The reality is, working at a startup is tough at
times. To make it you need to have passion for what you’re doing
and you need to mesh with the ideals of of the company.

There are a few boxes we like
to tick in the interview process, but references tend to be the
most revealing background check into a person’s character.

3. Attract the best
people.

Post an ad for a great job and
you’re bound to get hundreds of applicants; getting the right
people to apply is another story. Early stage startups are asking
people to make a bet on the company. You have to convince
talented people to leave their secure and potentially higher
paying jobs in exchange for an opportunity to go further in the
future.

Our company is based in Dallas,
Texas; its a great place for our business to be, but the
challenge is that while there are many talented professionals,
you don’t have the same pool of startup-veterans that you might
find in hubs like Silicon Valley or New York. As a result you
have to work harder to identify top local talent or convince
people to make the move across the country. It comes back to
finding people who are looking for more than just a job. You need
people who will go the extra mile for the opportunity to build a
career at a company that is doing something great, and you need
people who are driven to pursue personal and professional
development.

4. Make the best people
better.

At the very beginning it might
be possible to build your team on an ad hoc basis but as growth
accelerates its essential to invest in getting the most out of
your people. I like to tie performance measurement directly to
company goals so that I can understand who is having the greatest
impact and identify where the weaknesses are. The best people
understand that professional development is a shared
responsibility between the employee and employer, and they’re
eager to ask for and respond to personal feedback on their
performance. This is particularly challenging at the
start-up phase, because everyone has an impact on multiple
dimensions of the business.

A simple way to get more out of
people is to give them a vested interested in the outcome of
their work. When it comes time to review performance, employees
should be just as concerned with how they are progressing against
shared goals as the company is. Whether it means a promotion,
higher responsibility, compensation or some other reward, it is
critical to make it clear to employees why their hard work
mattersto
them.

5. Hire the
best.

When you’re just getting
started, hiring great people is hard. No amount of perks will
make it easier to convince people to leave their perfectly good
job to join a startup they may never have heard of. You need to
find the unicorns out there who are looking for something
more.

What’s the number one thing I
think about when it comes to hiring? This might be obvious, but
it's never just one thing. You have to look at the full picture
of the person and understand why they want the job, what they
want to do for the company and how they plan to execute. The best
people to hire are the ones who are in it for the opportunity.
They’re not there for the paycheck or the work life balance.
They’re there because they believe in the company and are hungry
for the opportunity to be a part of something special. The good
news is the more established your company gets, the easier it is
to find people who want to jump on that opportunity.